Dibs

Dibs! has received a press release from Cleis Press in San Francisco about an upcoming reading in the city featuring successful West Coast writer Stephen Elliott, author of five books including 2004’s Happy Baby (a novel about a down-and-out masochist which some said was autobiographical). Elliott’s father started contacting the media after Happy Baby came out, claiming that the representations of the creepy father in that book were fictional and not based on him, as Elliott remarked on his own blog: “Here’s something weird. My father, who was an awful and abusive father, is leaving bad reviews of my books on Amazon.com. The most recent one being for Happy Baby, posted under the name Blum732, blum being his last name before he changed it and 732 being the last three digits of his email address. If there’s a lesson here I guess it’s that abusive parents don’t stop being abusive just because they get older. Abusive relationships are psychological in nature and if you know an abuser, someone who lashes out and can’t control their emotions, get away from that person. Cut the cord and never look back.” Raising James Frey’s specter, the press release from Cleis muses: “Fiction or memoir? Stephen Elliott’s blistering new collection inhabits a mysterious area in between. As with all his work, these stories have the raw ring of truth filtered through Elliott’s poetic sensibility.” Ahhh, the raw ring of truth. But filtered, mind you! Filtered!!! Elliott has a new short-story collection called My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. Its eleven linked stories are mostly told by a masochist who goes from being down-and-out to being a successful West Coast writer. According to Publishers Weekly, the narrator “gets a black eye from Ambellina, who also smothers him by sitting on his face and puts a ball gag in his mouth while they watch Casablanca. In ‘I’ll Love You Back,’ Theo writes with the butt plug that girlfriend Eden has ordered him to wear firmly in place. Between Theo’s granular descriptions of being hurt and the generic, robo-dom quality of the gals who hurt him (distinguished mostly by thickness of thigh and color of hair), the stories all tend to blur together in a sexual vacuum, with funny descriptions of Theo’s improving quotidian in between—which is the point: torture, repetition and teasing are the focus of Theo’s life and his work.” Maybe soon we’ll all inhabit that “mysterious area in between.”